Runescape:A Day in the life

I'm Mod Deg, a content developer in the team formerly known as "Team 1", and now "The Watch". You're most likely to know me from the recent Tuska and Raids updates, but I'm told that I used to work on other updates.

Mod Asherz recently wrote an excellent account of the day in the life of a Technical Developer, which covered an average Monday and the bug fixing process in quite a lot of detail. Rather than cover old ground, and talk about another average day with all of the instances of "Technical" replaced with "Content", I decided I'd talk about a non-average day. So here's an rs account of Raids release from the perspective of one of its' developers.

We spent the morning of release sneaking some last minute fixes and tweaks into the release build. We realised that with some unfortunate kiting, Durzag's body could occasionally block his arena exit. The whole team was excited and slightly nervous. We'd been working on Raids for about six months and it was about to be released. Would players like it? Were the bosses too easy? Would players immediately find all of our Easter eggs?*

The update timer went up at 12:10. Half of the team sprinted to go get lunch, to be back in time to watch players exploring Mazcab for the first time. Thanks to the magic of multitwitch, I spent the day watching every raids streamer simultaneously. We're talking full big brother mode. I was watching like a hawk to make sure nothing was breaking. No Durzag kill escaped my gaze. Except the ones that weren't being livestreamed. Those ones escaped my gaze.

I did most of the design and development work on Durzag, so the race for the world first kill of him was a treat for me. I knew that the top groups would be able to take him down in an attempt or two, as he was intentionally much easier than existing bosses. The first group to defeat Durzag, did so on their first attempt, but they fought tooth and nail for it. With only two low health survivors at the end it was a real rollercoaster and we couldn't believe they finally made it. Naturally, there was an issue with boss looting that arose at this point, so my attention turned to figuring out what happened.

With all big updates, there's always an issue or two that slips through the cracks and goes into the live game. I spent the afternoon hunting as many of these down as I could as they got reported, all the while keeping tabs on the progress players were making Yakamaru. That and sand prices. That was a fun thing to refresh periodically.

About ten hours after release, Yakamaru was finally defeated. I intently watched the screen to make sure I didn't see anything go wrong. Sure enough, the loot system hotfix from earlier in the end seemed to work and everyone looked like they'd gotten their hard earned rewards. With that I could finally go home and rest stay up all night and wait for Goebiebands.

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